Abstract of Thesis

This paper examines notions of the "alien" and the "citizen" or the outsider and insider based on the Chinese Filipino experience as portrayed in Charlson Ong's novel, Banyaga: The Song of War (2006). Although the Chinese have lived in the Philippine archipelago since the twelfth century, they have always been considered banyaga (alien or foreigner) by Filipino "natives." I argue that the marginalization of the Chinese has led them to specialization in trade and commerce, which in turn has steered them, paradoxically, towards exceptionalism. As such, I correlate Georg Simmel's concept of the stranger with Ong's banyaga and argue that "strangeness" positions the Chinese to become the "triumphant capitalist" and "flexible citizen" personified by the Chinese tycoon in Banyaga. Historically, the Chinese in the Philippines have been at the margins of society. Their socio-political alienation in Philippine society is not only due to their race but also from their historic role as trader, middleman, mercantilist, and capitalist. The fictive re-construction of the past in Banyaga exposes the limitations of legal and cultural citizenship premised on race, origins, nativity, territoriality, and monoculturalism. As a counterpoint to Banyaga, The Embarrassment of Riches (2000) is also examined. Embarrassment, which is a construction of the future based on the past, is a literary intervention that allows us to explore the multiple strands of national identity and the complex, even predatory, transnational processes that impact the nation-state due to increasing migration and global expansion of capitalism.

This dissertation is a study of the literary representations of the Philippine Revolution against Spain and the United States which took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. The literary work of select Filipino historical novelists featured in this study is both a political and moral call for national unity around the iconic symbol of the nation that has endured to this day: the Philippine Revolution of 1896 / 1898. Similar to nationalist historians, historical novelists write the story of the nation. Through national homogenization, these novelists create notions and visions of a nation that gesture towards wholeness and unity despite what is known about the Philippine social system: strong family, kinship, and ethnic ties that underlie the propensity for fragmentation which in turn reveals itself in recurring factional politics and regionalism. The homogenizing tendencies of the Philippine historical novel to address disunity are revealed through chronotopicity (the novelistic time-space organization) and intertextuality (the interface between the “fictional” and “historical”). The novel then assumes a form that deviates from the time-honored European norm of “seamlessness of fact and fiction.” In fact, the novelists expose the seams between the “fictional” and the “historical,” such that fragments and chunks of the historical record are visibly imbedded within the novelistic text. The novel itself becomes an archive: a repository of the nation’s history for present and future generations of readers and citizens. Thus, this study is about “revolution” in three levels: the literary (formal), the historiographical (the writing of history), and the political (nation-making).